2024 in review: starting my hiking blog
Following on from my 2023, 2021 and 2020 wrap-up posts, I’m back for another year in review! This marks 5 years of me running my blog, and in 2024 I introduced the new hiking section on my site. I had a pretty prolific year, writing just over 70 posts.
Coming from only writing programming posts, hiking is a lot easier (and funner) to write about, as it is more opinion-based. Programming posts require a lot more brain power as you have to think of the best way to explain to the reader a technical topic, and you also want to make sure you are getting all the details right. That’s not to say hiking posts are all easy - I still have to put time into researching course options and public transport access and the like.
Going forward into 2025, I’m planning on continuing to write a lot more hiking content, but I also want to balance that with some occasional programming topics, as I quite enjoy the variety.
Site statistics: page views and the most popular posts
Now, onto the stats! A lot of my site’s page views come from people searching something in Google, and then stumbling across my blog. This year, I saw just under 45,000 clicks from Google search.
I also started using another analytics provider called Umami. Since I only started using it at the end of year, I don’t have a full year’s worth of data, but if we compare the month of November:
- Google search: 3900 clicks
- Umami analytics: 6500 total views, 5300 visits and 4800 visitors
There’s a fair few people who are viewing this site not just coming from a Google search, although actually Umami puts the number of visitors coming from Google at 4350 so maybe the Google search numbers are a little off as well. Analytics is a very hard thing to track accurately. Bots and page crawlers can count towards views, and ad blocker users don’t get counted in analytics, so I take this all with a grain of salt.
My most popular posts of the year were mostly the same as 2023 - my old programming posts about Jest and building a table of contents in React contribute to a majority of my site’s page views. Although I wrote these posts in 2020 and 2021, I have gone back to a couple of them and updated them to make sure they are still relevant for 2024 as well.
In terms of hiking posts, my most popular are my YAMAP guide, and a surprise hit was my post on taking the ferry up to Hokkaido. I set out to write about my hikes and it turns out it’s the hiking-adjacent posts that get the most attention. My Mt Tanzawa hike was the most popular post about a mountain, but it’s all still very small numbers in terms of overall viewership.
On my site’s drop in views
Ironically, I didn’t do any writing in 2023, and did a lot of writing this year - yet if you compare this year’s stats to my 2023 review, you’ll notice that my Google search clicks have more than halved from the 111k I got last year. Now, I do this blog as a hobby, and page views are just something that’s fun to see go up (or in this case, down) so I’m not really worried about it. But I was curious as to why this is happening.
My programming blog
So a lot of my views are from my old programming content - and so a drop in my overall page views comes straight from a drop in views to my programming posts. One obvious answer could be that better stuff that has been written in the meantime, and so thats why the page views have dropped as people now go to other sites to get their info.
But Google also lets you see what position your page ranks on the Google search results, and that number hasn’t actually dropped - my posts are still showing up at around the same point on the page. It’s just the views that have gone down. I have two theories on why this is:
a) The things I’m writing about are dated, and people don’t really need to Google them anymore or there’s less interest in the topic.
b) More programmers are using AI, and can ask ChatGPT to write parts of their code for them, or their code IDEs will auto-complete it. AI is not going to take my job just yet, but for straightforward stuff like writing tests, it can get at least partially correct output. And since my most popular posts are about Jest (a testing framework) it would make sense that people don’t need to Google these things as much if AI can figure it out for them.
Either way, this is totally fine - I don’t expect a post I have written to continue to get the same level of views forever (as nice as that would be).
My hiking blog
The other question is, since I’ve written so many posts about hiking, where are the views for those? The main thing to keep in mind is that when you write a new post, it doesn’t immediately show up in Google search results. And my posts seem to take a particularly long while. For example, my most popular hiking posts at the moment are Mt Tanzawa and Mt Ishiwari, both which I wrote about in January of 2024. And yet the views for these have only started trickling in in September, more than 8 months after I wrote it.
The other thing I’m realising is that while people may want to hike Japan’s mountains, if they’ve never heard of the mountain before, they are never going to Google for it, and so are never going to stumble across my post about it. And sometimes I write about some really niche mountains. So I’m thinking I need to diversify beyond just writing about the mountain itself, but investing more time into making my hiking page more of a portal into discovering different hikes, and doing wrap-up posts like my recent one on the best day hikes from Tokyo.
So I’m hoping that all the posts I have written are like an investment that are going to pay off in the new year. Although my blog did have a dip this year, you can also see the page views have started to go up again starting in October, so I hope that trend continues.
Fingers crossed!
My book reviews section
The third section of my blog that I haven’t mentioned at all yet is my books section, which I rewrote this year. I’m quite happy with how the design turned out for this one. Now this is more just something I had designed for fun, rather than something I’m expecting to get a lot of usage.
The one funny thing is I ranted about a rom-com called the Love Hypothesis, where the author is a huge Kylo Ren x Rey fan and basically wrote them in as the main characters (she even named the male character Adam, which is the same as the actor who plays Kylo, Adam Driver). This occasionally gets a view from Google when someone searches “Adam Driver Love Hypothesis”.
On having a site with multiple topics
So at the start of the year, my home page continued to look like my programming blog:
I had a little link out to my hiking blog in the top right, but otherwise my hiking stuff was all contained inside of emgoto.com/hiking/. I originally started my layout off like this, because I felt like emgoto.com was a “programming blog” and it felt weird to suddenly add in the hiking posts as well. Especially since the design was very programming-themed.
As I continued writing more hiking posts throughout the year, it felt a bit weird that my content was separated like this, so I re-designed the home page to be more like a neutral space, and have it link out to all my different sections. I also colour-coded the links (green for hiking, purple for programming and yellow for books).
I think my blog is in quite a unique position where I am covering completely different topics, so I struggled for quite a while with how to design it in a way that each section has its own identity, but navigating between the sections still makes sense. I think I’m in a spot now where I’m happy with the overall design, but we’ll see how next year pans out.
Social media: Bluesky and my newsletter
I had been inactive on Twitter for the last couple of years, but I decided to try out Bluesky recently since it’s had a boom in popularity. Right now I have 45 followers. I’ve seen a couple of familiar faces from back when I used Twitter, and so it’s nice to reconnect with the dev community again.
I’ll be honest I struggle a bit with what to post on there though. My blog is my own space - people can come visit me here if they want. But on the other hand, posting on Bluesky feels very self-promotional. I get that some people follow me because they want to know when I’ve published something new, but at the same time I kind of struggle with being like “hey look at me”, if that makes sense.
My other new posting avenue is my newsletter, which currently has 95 subscribers. I originally had the newsletter sign-up link on my blog back in 2020-21, so nearly all of the subscribers are from that period. I actually lost 5 or so subscribers when I published my first newsletter at the beginning of December (fair enough). I want to commit to a year’s worth of posting newsletters, and then I’ll evaluate whether I want to continue it after that.
I also have an Instagram with 118 followers. I don’t really know what to do about this one. I post very infrequently on there. The most value it probably provides is that it lets me stay in touch with some of my friends.
Plans and goals for 2025
My main plan for 2025 is to continue to write a lot about hiking in Japan. I have so many mountains I still want to write about! Originally, my main goal was to reach 100k page views a year. Looking at my Umami analytics, I’m actually closer to this than I realised, so I’m a little hopeful I can go higher than that.
I do have mixed feelings about having a page view goal. I don’t make any money from this blog (nor do I plan to) so it does feel a bit arbitrary. The honest reason is it just cool to see the page views (numbers go up, brain go brr) and to know how many people my blog is reaching. A better way to think of it might be that if I’m going to invest this much time in writing about my hiking, I’d want it to be as useful to as many people as possible. It’s a bit of a waste if no one reads it!
Even if my blog didn’t get any views, I’m still quite proud of it. I really do loving having my own space on the internet where I can express myself. If you were considering starting a blog yourself, I highly recommend it.
And that’s it for 2024 - hope you all have a wonderful 2025!